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Re: SAX LexicalHandler::comment issue

• From: John Cowan <cowan@m...>
• To: peter@s...
• Date: Sun, 08 Jul 2001 02:27:24 -0400 (EDT)

Peter Flynn scripsit:

> But that's what comments are *for*...in any language.
> You mean you'd prefer to debug other people's C++ or
> Perl or LaTeX or FORTRAN *without* comments? 

Of course not.  But in programming languages, there are two levels:
code for the compiler/interpreter, comments for the human reader.
Therefore, compilers discard comments but editors do not.

The Infoset is not about what editors need, but what application
programs need.  Comments have IMO no place in it.

The reason they are there is probably that some people misuse
comments to do what PIs are meant for: directives to the application
that should pass through parsing.

In addition, scripts in HTML (not XHTML) *look like* comments
because of the <!-- ... --> they are typically wrapped in, but
in fact they are not comments: the SCRIPT element is of type
CDATA (which has no XML equivalent), meaning that everything
inside up to the first "</[letter]" is taken as character data.

-- 
John Cowan                                   cowan@c...
One art/there is/no less/no more/All things/to do/with sparks/galore
	--Douglas Hofstadter

• References:
  • Re: SAX LexicalHandler::comment issue
    • From: Peter Flynn <peter@s...>

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